Tampering with the text to increase awareness of poetry's art. (Theory and practice with a Hispanic perspective)

Abstract

Theoreticians have linked the act of poetic creation inextricably to the principle of linguistic 'play'. A number of Hispanic poets have experimented with transformational and permutational creativity of the type that computers can accomplish quite easily. Such computer-induced play enhances the study of poetry by imbuing the poetic text with a new and dynamic dimension in which on-screen manipulation destabilizes the text, allowing the reader to explore it more thoroughly than is possible in the fixed printed medium and to appreciate it as a unique blend of word, structure and pattern. Well-known poems from writers who have themselves experimented with textual alteration, as well as works of others who have not, serve to illustrate diverse modalities of textual alteration, which are grouped by the types of transformation carried out by the computer